Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!lth.se!newsuser From: xjeldc@tts.lth.se (Jan Engvald) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: checksumming Novell? Message-ID: <1990Nov15.022409.13727@lth.se> Date: 15 Nov 90 02:24:09 GMT References: Sender: newsuser@lth.se (LTH network news server) Reply-To: xjeldc@ldc.lu.se (Jan Engvald) Organization: Lund University Computing Center, Sweden Lines: 28 In article hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: >We've been bitten a few times by corrupted data in files and routing >updates transmitted by Novell. The ultimate cause is a problem in a >serial controller card on one of our routers. The vendor is fixing >the problem. However I'm very nervous about using a protocol that >doesn't seem to have any protocol-level way of detecting bad packets. >Novell is based on XNS, but apparently they always set the checksum >field to ones. Does anyone know whether it's possible to configure >Novell software to do checksumming? Also, if our routers put a >checksum in the checksum field, do you know whether Novell will check >it, ignore it, or reject the packet? From what I've seen, a packet with an IPX checksum different from hex FFFF will be rejected. So checksuming is not optional, on the contrary, it is NOT ALLOWED for Novell IPX. They trust in the Ethernet CRC, and on small LAN that's usually enough. But not with LANs connected together with routers. Jan Engvald, Lund University Computing Center ________________________________________________________________________ Address: Box 783 E-mail: Jan.Engvald@ldc.lu.se S-220 07 LUND Earn/Bitnet: xjeldc@seldc52 SWEDEN (Span/Hepnet: Sweden::Gemini::xjeldc) Office: Soelvegatan 18 VAXPSI: psi%2403732202020::xjeldc Telephone: +46 46 107458 (X.400: C=se; A=TeDe; P=Sunet; O=lu; Telefax: +46 46 138225 OU=ldc; S=Engvald; G=Jan) Telex: 33533 LUNIVER S